


be the lightning in me (that strikes relentless)

by alchemystique



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, but not in this fic, sexytimes were had, sometime before this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-18
Updated: 2014-01-18
Packaged: 2018-01-09 03:38:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1140971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemystique/pseuds/alchemystique
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The morning after. Set sometime after the defeat of the WW.</p>
            </blockquote>





	be the lightning in me (that strikes relentless)

**Author's Note:**

> Fluff. So much fluff. I'm not even sorry for the diabetic coma this causes.
> 
> Also please check out sybbelle's awesome artwork here: http://sybbelle.tumblr.com/post/73502785880/the-paper-was-newer-pages-whiter-the-script-a

**be the lightning in me (that strikes relentless)**

 

Emma blinks her eyes open blearily, moving to stretch herself awake, but goes stock still as the memories of the night before come to the forefront of her mind.

And her vision.

Her hand is curled loosely atop the rising and falling chest of one Killian Jones, her nose buried in the dark hair curling around his ear, her leg slung easily over one of his, the coarse hairs there tickling at the back of her knee.

Emma has a panicked moment, her heart racing in her chest, where she plots a way out of the bed, out of the room, leaving like she always has, but…

No. This is different. This is not a strangers dark room in Boston, in Denver, in Tallahassee, this is not some overnight lay that she can run from, never to be seen again, not a nameless faceless stranger she could care less about. This is _Hook_.

Unclenching the hand that has turned into a fist in the span of time its taken for her to _freak the fuck_ out, she feels her body begin to unwind as well, her eyes adjusting to the dim light of dawn in the Enchanted Forest. Hook’s breathing is steady and even, his face calm in sleep, and Emma can feel the way her body eases into his, the way her mind goes still and peaceful as he huffs a deep breath.

Slowly, carefully, Emma lets her fingers spread, sliding through the dusting of hair she finds there, her thumb dipping into the crevice of skin below his collarbone.

Her own breathing calms, and she takes in the line of Hook’s jaw, the hollow of his throat, the curve of his ear, the -

_Oh my god._

The mark is stark across his neck, just in front of his pulse point, red and bruised and something in Emma keens even as she’s trying to think of a way to hide it (yeah right, not with his plunging necklines), to explain it, to…

Oh hell, it’s not as if they’d been subtle, in recent weeks, tiptoeing around each other even as they shot saucy, flirtatious words across the dinner table, and that _dance_ , that ridiculous dance at the ball last night, all simmering heat and too close bodies and - _Jesus_ , he’d _dipped_ her at the end, right in front of David and Ruby, his breath hot against her neck when he’d pulled her back up, his eyes gleaming with promise and passion and Emma can remember the flush that had spread across her bare shoulders as he’d tucked a stray curl that had fallen from her artfully piled bun back behind her ear.

The memory has her body warming again, her cheeks burning as she shuffles her leg against his. It’s actually a shock she’s awake right now, to be honest. They can’t have fallen asleep more than a few hours ago, the giddy after effects of more than a few heavy and satisfying workouts finally tiring them out.

She’d giggled ( _giggled_ ) at him as he’d glanced at her through heavy lidded eyes, tucking herself against him despite years of crashing at the far edge of the bed for a quick getaway, and he’d thrown his left arm around her, his body caging her in in the middle of his stupid, overlarge four poster with piles and piles of pillows, and his grin had been dopey and sleepy as he pressed a kiss to her nose.

(The pillows are strewn around the edges of the bed, and she smiles at the memory of his fingers caressing the skin of her shoulder as he pulled the blankets up around her.)

She feels - god, there are a million different emotions battling for dominance in her chest, a million little touches and caresses flitting through her mind, but all Emma knows for sure is this feels right.

It’s a terrifying thought, and she lets out a shaky breath, throat a little tight, and startles when Hook’s voice breaks her reverie.

"Planning your daring escape?"

Her eyes flit to his face, gazes catching as he turns his head halfway towards her. He’s got an eyebrow raised, but the act looks almost sleepy, as if he’s only half trying at it, and his eyes are blue blue _blue_ in the soft morning light.

Emma’s response is to shift her fingers across his collarbone, delighting in the small tremor and the quick exhale of breath this causes.

"I can close my eyes if you like."

She huffs out a breath against him, her lips pressing into the column of his shoulder even as she glares at him. “Shut up.”

He blinks back at her, the edge of reserve fading away into a grin as he turns into Emma, his good hand slipping under the blankets, sliding around her waist to drag her into him.

The ease with which their lips meet is a wonderful thrill, and the kiss is soft and quiet and a thousand other things Emma never would have imagined possible between them. He groans softly as they shift beneath the covers, and she can feel him half hard against her thigh, but there’s none of the urgency from last night in their kiss, and when it ends Hook throws his head back dramatically, his grin belying the heavy sigh that tumbles from his lips.

"Love, although the prospect is quite wonderful, I may need more recovery time before we repeat a single thing we did last night."

Her smile widens without her explicit permission. “Repeat? You don’t have anything else in your repertoire?”

The look he shoots her from behind the heavy lid of his eyes is absolutely scandalized, and she lets out a breathy laugh as his face turns predatory. She’s full on chuckling by the time he gets her hands pinned above her head (one handed, seriously, this man) his face looming over her own.

Her body sorely protests, the stretch of muscles, that quiet, warm ache seeping into her very bones, and his eyes catch hers, the look in them soft and sure.

He dives in for a kiss before flinging himself sideways, dragging her right with him, and she hears something ‘pop’ in the general area of his shoulder.

As he settles her back into him on a wince, he shakes his head. “No, I’ve nothing left to give. We’ve exhausted every option. You’ll have to leave me here to wither and die alone in this bed.”

Her eye roll is met with a soft jostle of protest. “Drama queen.”

"Of all the names that have spilled from your lips in the course of the night, I believe I like that one least."

Even as her smile widens again for a moment across her face, she can’t help but wonder at the ease of this, the gentle banter and the familiarity and the cuddling ( _the horror)_ that she’s always struggled to find easy, but here, under the soft light peeking through the open curtains and the feel of Hook’s fingers tracing circles across her skin she feels light as a feather, more free than she can ever remember.

She buries her face in his neck to hide the look of terror that must cross her face at the realization, and feels his chin press into the crown of her hair as his steady heartbeat thrums against her hand.

"Gods, it’s not yet daybreak. Why in hellfire are we awake?"

Her heart does a strange skip around the word ‘we’ which she faithfully ignores, swinging her leg back up around him, and he hisses a curse at her.

"Warm your feet somewhere else, woman, they’re bloody freezing."

Instead, she slips her other foot around his calf, and despite his protests he bundles her in closer. The stacatto rhythm of his heart jumps at her soft sigh, but she doesn’t mention it, as surely as he hadn’t mentioned her skipping pulse around his words.

But in spite of her urge to ignore it, it drums across her skull, warm and comfortable and safe and ‘we’.

When he speaks again his voice is hesitant. “In all seriousness, if you wish to return to your quarters, I’ll not begrudge you the secrecy.”

Her next words are careful, but she can’t help the way her fingers ghost across the marvelous hickey blooming across his neck. She’s pretty sure she can still see a few individual teeth marks. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s really an option at this point.”

"Your family will be worried if you’re not in your rooms when they summon for breakfast."

"Uhuh, um, after that little display last night I think they’ll be more embarrassed than anything." She chances a glance up at him, only to catch the seriously besotted look etched into his gaze.

He hums amusedly. “Well, then I say we stay here all day. Save your poor elderly parents from the embarrassment of it all.” Says the three century old pirate.

Before she can talk herself out of it she leans up to press her lips to his again in answer, and he eagerly responds, a low groan escaping his lips against her, apparently quicker to recover than he’d thought, if the hand trailing towards her hipbone is any indication.

__________

There’s a breeze sliding through the still open curtains as Hook returns from his mission with a pair of trousers and one of her old worn teeshirts tucked around a bra. He looks a little traumatized.

"The maids assigned to your rooms are absolute terrors, love."

She stretches out, chuckling as he seems to get a bit distracted by the move. He clears his throat and quickly glances away as he tosses her the change of clothes he’d gone in search of. Emma wonders if he’d had to ask one of the maids where she kept her bras. It’s hard not to start laughing hysterically at the thought. “What did they do to you?”

"They _giggled_ at me!" His arm sweeps out wide as he shoots her an absolutely shocked look.

"What, like, look at this dashing rogue rifling through the princesses undergarments?"

"No, like, ‘look at the cute little bunny with the floppy ear, isn’t it adorable?’ I’m a bloody _menace_. A pirate - people _feared_ me!"

She can’t help it. As she slips into the pair of pants he’d brought her, she cackles at him. “Oh, please,  you spent twenty minutes yesterday chasing a family of ducks across the bridge so they didn’t get run over by a carriage.”

"That was Henry’s idea."

"Kinda proving my point there."

He sat at the edge of the bed, face stretching ever closer to petulant pout.

"To be fair, they were probably laughing about the horribly badly hidden love bite on your neck. Did you seriously try to cover it up?"

"I was attempting to be discreet."

"As you snuck into my rooms to steal clothes, with more buttons buttoned than I’ve ever seen and a scarf around your neck. You were practically screaming to be discovered."

He shot her a look of mock annoyance, which quickly morphed into the same seductive grin she’d been hoping to avoid since he left. “Down boy,” she told him, trying to hide her smile as he bit his lip. For being a few millenia old, he certainly had a knack for puppy eyes.

"We don’t have to join your parents for dinner," he told her, standing now to press close to her, settling between her open legs. "They won’t miss us."

"I’m starving."

"I’ll pop down to the kitchens and knick something for us. No one will even know I’m there."

Ha. The last time he’d ‘popped down to the kitchens’ he’d had a row with the pastry chef and nearly burned the castle down.

"Cool your libido for a few hours. My parents are probably hoping I don’t show up, but Henry will worry."

His face softened at the mention of her son, which did all sorts of unmentionable things to her stomach, all of which she ignored about as well as the ‘we’ still thrumming against her ribcage.

"Fine. But I’ll make no promises about the aforementioned libido."

On an eyeroll, Emma pressed a hand into his chest, pushing him away from her. “I’d expect nothing less from our fearsome resident duck wrangler.”

_________

Forks clinked quietly against china as Henry regaled them all with the tale of his day, his hands flinging this way and that and his eyes bright, his voice shimmering with excitement. Snow and Charming had spent the whole of dinner carefully avoiding eye contact with Emma, which honestly mostly just amused her - served them right, for all the times Emma had walked in on them ‘resting’.

There’d been a very pregnant pause near the beginning of the meal when Emma had slapped a hand high on Hook’s thigh to stop his anxious foot tap, and she’d pulled the hand away quickly, but despite the awkwardness, Emma was in a kind of blissful happiness throughout dinner.

"-and then Leroy slipped and fell and I - hey, what happened to your neck?" Her son was looking plaintively at Hook now, his eyes narrowed on the bright red welt blooming under his jaw. The room had gone deathly silent, Snow and David comically frozen across the table, but Hook, without missing a beat, gave Henry a wide grin. "Animal attack," he said as he shovelled another bite of potatoes into his mouth, and then Snow was patting a coughing David on the back as Henry gave them all his best ‘grown ups are weird’ stare.

Thankfully, her son took the excuse at face value, shrugging, before launching back into his story. The rest of dinner continued this way, with David and Snow carefully staring at their plates or at Henry as if looking at anything else would cause them to burst into flames.

Unable to tap his foot anymore, Hook had taken to drumming his fingers on the edge of the table, which after a few minutes was enough to drive Emma crazy, so without thought she slapped her hand down on top of his.

Henry’s eyes caught the movement, and he looked like he might pause in his oration of the crazy sword fight with the dwarves, but seemed to think better of it, gesturing wildly again as Emma felt Hook twine his fingers through hers, looking at ease for the first time that night, and far less likely to blurt out ‘I had sex with your daughter’ at any moment.

As they cleared plates later that night, stacking them carefully for the kitchen staff, Henry all but ordered them to meet him in the library (You too, Captain!), taking off down the hall before a single one of them could ask why.

They followed at a slower pace, Snow falling behind David after a moment, smiling at Hook as she grasped at Emma’s arm.

"I need to steal my daughter, we’ll catch up in a moment." Snow continued to smile until Hook had turned the corner, and then Emma was faced with a raised eyebrow (or an attempt at one, at least, Emma was far too used to the acrobatics Hook could do with his brows). "So… that’s a thing then?"

This was so not a conversation Emma wanted to have, and her face must have shown it.

"Oh Emma," she said, and where once Emma knew the phrase would have been of concern, now it looked like Snow was fighting to hide a grin. "He cares for you a great deal, your pirate."

Her throat suddenly dry, Emma nodded. “Yeah. He. Yeah, he does.”

"And…you…" Snow trailed off expectantly, as if hoping Emma would continue.

"And I?"

"Well how do you feel?"

"Like a teenage girl being interrogated about the boy she brought home."

"Emma."

She shrugged in exasperation. “I’m not - come on, why is this so important?”

"I just want you to be happy, Emma."

"I am!" It came out a lot more defensive than she’d been hoping, the tension of the night finally coming out. She sighed. "It’s…it’s not like you and David. I don’t…we’re different. But I am happy. He…he makes me…" Her shoulders bobbed in a nervous shrug. "Happy."

Comfortable. Safe. Strong. Beautiful. A hundred other things at any moment, none of which she wanted to tell her pregnant and hormonal mother.

Snow smiled a conspiratorial smile as she slipped an arm into the crook of Emma’s elbow.

"C’mon. Don’t want to keep the boys waiting. Who knows what kind if trouble they might get into."

———

The library was a work in progress. Unlike the rest of the castle, there were still exposed beams and half-built shelves, but it was slowly coming together. In the fully built area of the room a few chaise lounges huddled around the fire, and Emma and Snow found the rest of their group there.

"Alright, kid, what are we all doing here?"

She watched her son heave a very familiar book onto the table. His book of fairytales. She’d thought it was lost in Storybrooke, but there it was, golden lettering glittering in the firelight.

"Okay. I’m glad you found it, but-"

"We found it a while ago. That’s not what I wanted to show you. This," he swung the tome open, sliding a finger into the pages near the back of the book, "is what I wanted to show you."

David’s eyes were bright and wide, as if he was in on some secret, and as Emma leaned closer to the pages, she understood why.

The paper was newer, pages whiter, the script a little different than the rest of the book, but there, adorned at the top of a brightly painted beanstalk, was the header: “The Tales of Emma Swan and Killian Jones”. Suddenly her sons obsession with the kiss that had woken her from the Black Fairy’s curse made a whole lot of sense.

"Its been done for, like, a month, but I didn’t think you were ready for it. Until tonight. Did you guys really think you were fooling anyone about the massive hickey on Killian’s neck?"

Emma makes a mental note to figure out where the hell her kid found out about hickeys even as she barks out choked laughter, her heart racing as she reaches out to trace the picture. She’d been so scared to tell Henry about her growing feelings for the man who was most certainly not his father, but Henry, her beautiful, wonderful son, had known, had seen it, had made this amazing testament to his belief that Killian Jones (and Henry was the only person in the world who called him that, how had she never noticed that until now?) was an important part of Emma’s story.

"Oh, kid…" Henry was grinning, practically dancing on the balls of his feet as he looked between Emma and Hook.

Hook.

He looked like he might cry, the stupid, idiot man, staring at the book like it was a work of art, his own hand hovering over his name for a moment. He blinked as he turned to Henry. “Thank you, lad.”

Henry’s grin, if possible, widened, and Emma felt something halfway between a laugh and a sob bubble in her throat when Hook reached out to hug him.

God, this stupid family.

"Wanna read it?" Henry asked from the depths of Hooks coat, and the pirate gave a shaky nod as he ruffled Henry’s hair.

"Hey, why don’t you read it, Henry?" David suggested as they all took a moment to compose themselves, and Henry readily agreed.

Emma’s gaze caught Hook’s as Snow settled into the chair next to David, and she reached out a hand to him, watching him carefully as she curled in close to him. He looked like he’d been shattered and patched back together all in the trembling breath of air that shuddered through him before she tucked her hand into his, and as she felt his lips press into her hair she hoped no one saw her eyes fill with tears.

"Once upon a time, in a far away land called Boston, a knock sounded at the lost princess Emma’s door. She didn’t know she was a princess yet, of course, but she would, nor did she know that the boy knocking at her door was a prince in his own right, and would manage to change her whole world. No, she didn’t know those things yet. But she would."

[ ](http://eatencrow.tumblr.com/)

 


End file.
